The Pilum – Did Legionaries Carry One or Two?
1 Video View·Sep 21, 2024
I used to be a museum guide, and when showing people the mannequins dressed as Romans, I used to tell the visitors that legionaries carried two pila, as I had seen it pictured in modern books. I may have been wrong.
The pilum (plural 'pila') was the standard throwing weapon of the Roman legions. Archaeologists has found weighted and unweighted versions of them, but were both types carried by every legionary?
The spark for this video was a discussion I had about the authenticity of a set of plastic model legionaries on the march. They were shown carrying one pilum and wearing lorica segmentata. I said that they should have two, but then found myself unable to back this up with evidence. Polybius, writing about the earlier period, with javelin-throwing velites, and the triarii at the back, says that the hastatii carried two types of pilum, but it isn't perfectly clear whether he meant that the unit carried both types, or each individual man within them. For the later days of the classic legionary, with no velites in front of him, and lorica segmentata on his back, I have no evidence for two pila per man.
There are certain nuggets of wisdom that get passed down the generations and repeated quite often,
written in books, which are then read by people who then write other books and repeat it again,
and then someone makes a video and then he says it again,
because, well, it's what they say, so presumably it's true.
And even if you haven't researched it independently, you could believe it,
it seems quite reasonable, and so you repeat it. And I have done the same.
But if we then later discover that perhaps there's not very good evidence for this thing that you say over and over,
well, maybe we should flag these things up. And so here I'm doing that now.
The Pelum. The Pelum is the standard throwing weapon of the Roman legionary of the late Republic and the Imperial period,
at least the earlier Imperial period. You're probably familiar with it.
It's the one with the long, thin, and often softened and bendy bit of iron before the spike.
And there are two kinds. That's what I was told, and that's what I told other people.
There are two kinds. There's the light Pelum, which gets thrown up into the air to rain down onto the enemy
from a distance of about 30 yards, and that seems perfectly sensible because it's the lighter one of the two.
It would go further, so yeah, 30 yards seems a perfectly good, reasonable range to throw that sort of thing.
And then you would throw your second Pelum, and that's the one with the lead-heavy weight on it,
and you would throw that really, really close. And again, that makes perfect sense because it's really heavy,
so it wouldn't go very far, but hey, it would pack one a hell of a punch at close range.
And so you throw that one about six yards, which gives you time to then draw your short sword, your gladius,
and get in there. And you'd be able to take advantage of the impact of your Pelum before the enemy could react,
could sort out his shield, and perhaps even stop reeling from the impact.
So, six yards. Again, perfectly reasonable distance.
The trouble is that it seems that there's actually very little evidence that Roman soldiers carried two Pela.
I don't know of any, in fact. No, that's not completely true. There's one gravestone which has a relief sculpture on it
of a guy with two Pela, but that's it as far as I know. I've not come across any literary reference
from the period saying that each man carried two. So it's perfectly possible each man actually only carried one.
There are plenty of sculptures and pictures showing them carrying one. Trajan's Column, a lot of the weapons
were actually separate. They weren't carved in with the stone. They were bronze, added later, and so
are now unfortunately missing. But a lot of them seem to have just a hole for just one.
It looks as though the guy was just carrying one Pela. So possibly we've been wrong all this time,
and we've been ... passing on this incorrect knowledge down generations. Maybe we should stop.
Now it could be the case. I can't prove that they didn't carry two Pela, but given that there's no
evidence for it, I think it's possibly dangerous to go around saying that they did. And it's also
perfectly reasonable to imagine that they might have just carried one, because, well, that's one
thing less you have to carry. And given that they were disciplined troops in formations, they could
easily have had all the guys with the light ones throw together at 30 yards, and then the other
guys with the heavy ones charge through the gaps and throw the heavy ones at six yards. And so you
still get the benefit of two volleys of Pela, but each man only has to carry one Pelum.
And I'm inclined to believe that that's the more likely of the two scenarios.
I can't prove it either way, but there you go. So Roman legionaries possibly only carried one Pelum.
Another reason, by the way, that we might imagine that Roman legionaries only carried one Pelum
is that the scutum, that is to say the legionary's standard shield, this is a late one but it'll do,
it has a horizontal handle. Now if you're throwing a Pelum with this hand and you're carrying two,
you then have to have the other one in the other hand, which, as you can see, it's not actually
that tricky. I just hook a thumb onto it and that's perfectly adequate. Although this one, of course,
would be the heavy one if I'm throwing the light one first, so this would be a little bit more
awkward. And you've got to imagine you're in a battle situation having to run across rough ground
and so forth, so it's just a little bit awkward to hold a second Pelum in this hand. But as I think
I've just demonstrated, it's actually not that difficult. So this doesn't rule it out, but it
is an argument used for why they might only have carried one Pelum.
Indybears!